Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
September 6, 2003
Everyone has something about Lott's latest untruth that I mentioned yesterday. Mark Kleiman says Isn't there anyone in the management of the American Enterprise Institute with a modicum of institutional self-respect?
Brad Delong replies: If they had any institutional self-respect, why…
September 5, 2003
Kevin Drum points out that a correction that Lott requested in response to this Washington Post item implies that Lott did not use "Mary Rosh" in emails when, in fact, Lott did. Drum thinks Lott is lying, which is certainly quite possible, but since there were hundreds of Rosh…
September 5, 2003
Jeff Soyer has a post where he is taken in by a Lott opinion piece. He quotes Lott:
In a new book, The Bias Against Guns, Bill Landes of the University of Chicago Law School and I examine multiple-victim public shootings in the United States from 1977 to 1999 and find that when…
September 4, 2003
Tom Spencer, commenting on Duncan's comments that I posted yesterday, writes: Unfortunately folks, as you well know, the damage is already done. We've got right-to-carry laws in the vast majority of states (mine being one of the notable exceptions of course) and there's…
September 3, 2003
John Quiggin points to an interesting compilation of fake Internet identities.
Tbogg is surprised that there are still media organizations that take Lott seriously. He also wonders where Lott got his numbers from. Well, the defensive gun use numbers come from this survey Lott…
September 2, 2003
Link to table
September 2, 2003
Otis Dudley Duncan has sent me some comments on the attempts by pro-gun folks to dismiss criticism of Lott as some sort of payback for Bellesiles:
I have gone out of my way to remark that the Bellesiles case is not helpful for evaluating Lott's work. My statement is in section 4 of the…
September 1, 2003
Lott has a posting responding to my comments on his claims that the news coverage of the shootings at the Appalachian School of Law was biased. I wrote:Unfortunately, Lott's counting methodology is flawed, his count missed half of the stories that mentioned the armed students, his version…
September 1, 2003
After Lott claimed that biased news coverage of the shootings at the Appalachian School of Law deliberately omitted a defensive gun use, I did my own analysis of the news stories and found that the alleged bias was the product of Lott's flawed counting methodology. Lott…
August 29, 2003
In his book The Seven Myths of Gun Control, Richard Poe has an extensive account of the murders. He is much more careful with his facts than the other pro-gun writers who hang an attack on safe storage laws on the tragedy. He interviewed the mother of the victims and…
August 28, 2003
In Lott's 8/20 blog entry he writes:There is a pretty obvious reason why these guys have choosen to publish their work in nonrefereed publications. Despite their continuing claims to the press, Ayres and Donohue's own papers do NOT provide any statistically significant…
August 27, 2003
Tom Wright demonstrates perfectly the misleading nature of Lott's postings on the coding errors: He also claims that the 100's of errors claimed for the study could make a difference without mentioning that these errors were corrected and the study still showed the same results…
August 26, 2003
In the posting where he finally admitted that he had made hundreds of coding errors, Lott insinuated that Ayres and Donohue had refused to release their data and that their results were not reproducible.
Unlike Ayres and Donohue, I have endeavored to make the data readily…
August 25, 2003
In his statement on the coding errors Lott tries to downplay the significance of the errors:Minor coding errors were discovered in the data set after it was first given out. The files available for downloading on this site have the corrected results using the statistical county level tests…
August 19, 2003
Ayres and Donohue have sent a letter to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, replying to Lott's 21 July letter. I agree with their description of Lott's behaviour as dishonest.
On July 21, 2003, researcher John Lott wrote a letter to the editor in which he tried to shore up support for his now…
August 18, 2003
A study by Kovandzic and Marvell has been published in July issue of Criminology and Public Policy. (A draft of their paper is here.) From the journal's news release about their findings:
In the recently published study "Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns: Crime Control through Gun…
August 16, 2003
Lott has an article in the National Review Online where once more misleads his readers about what happened at the Appalachian School of Law: "Last year, two law students with law-enforcement backgrounds as deputy sheriffs in another state stopped the shooting at the Appalachian Law…
August 14, 2003
Lott has a letter in the 26 July Columbus Dispatch replying to an earlier letter from Paul van Doorn. Lott repeats his claim from his 21 July letter: Yet, in the very same issue, another paper appeared by professors Plassmann and Whitley, who examined three additional years' worth of…
August 12, 2003
Jeff Johnson of CNSNews.com has a fourth story about the Lott parody site askjohnlott.org. Johnson discusses the evidence that Jonah Peretti is involved with the site and quotes Lott:
"I don't see how one can get around that [Peretti] either is running it, or he knows in detail…
August 11, 2003
Keneth Miles describes Lott and Lehrer's claims that crime increased in Washington DC after the gun ban as an excellent example of cherry picking.
Earlier, I observed that the only justification Lott offered for another claim he made about DC crime, that Baghdad had fewer…
August 10, 2003
Glenn Reynolds comments on the Ayres and Donohue's letter on the coding errors.
Reynolds also states that he is reluctant to believe charges of dishonesty against Lott because some critics have made ad hominem charges against him, for example, that his research was funded by…
August 10, 2003
Lott (along with Eli Lehrer) has an editorial in the Washington Times which claims that the 1976 gun ban caused crime to increase. D.C. residents need more protection: Crime has risen significantly since the gun ban went into effect. In the five years before Washington's ban in 1976,…
August 8, 2003
Scott Carlson at The Chronicle of Higher Education has a story (subscription required) about askjohnlott. He quotes Lott: "Someone called me up a couple of weeks ago, very angry, claiming that they got an e-mail from me, telling them that I was advising them to do illegal things," like…
August 8, 2003
The registration details for askjohnlott.org have changed: Registrant Name:Mary Rosh Registrant Organization:Center For Truth Registrant Street1:45 Main Street, 12th Floor Registrant City:Brooklyn Registrant State/Province:New York Registrant Postal Code:11201 Registrant Country:US Registrant…
August 7, 2003
After askjohnlott linked here some people decided that obviously I must be behind the site and emailed me to let me know what they thought of me. Nope. Not me. Using false identities is not my style.
It was also suggested to me that Lott might have set up askjohnlott.org as a…
August 6, 2003
Jeff Johnson has an story on the defacement of askjohnlott.org (now restored, by the way), but apparently both Lott and Larry Pratt suspect that the defacement was staged: "I think we have to assume that the owner of the fraudulent site that hijacked John Lott's name is running…
August 5, 2003
askjohnlott.org now just contains the following text: AskJohnLott.org was recently hacked by someone who values the Second Amendment but not the First. Although we at AskJohnLott.org can understand why pro-gun extremists would be afraid of free speech, we believe that the entire Bill of Rights…
August 5, 2003
Lott has a posting on his blog where he insistsfew will think that the site was set up with the intention of making others think that it was a parody.
I don't agree, but you can judge for yourself.
Jeff Johnson has another overblown story about askjohnlott.org. From the story: "That's…
August 4, 2003
There is now a disclaimer at the bottom of every page at askjohnlott.org: This site is not run by John Lott, he has no affiliation with it. It is run by Mary Rosh. John Lott used Mary Rosh to support his books in internet forums, and put false claims in her mouth. Now Mary Rosh has created this…
August 3, 2003
Timothy McGillicuty comments on Lott's attack on Levitt: To my immense amusement, an NRA nut named John Lott has attacked him for it because, as near as I can tell through the foam and spittle flying out of Lott's mouth, he wrote the Op-Ed piece to hide the fact that he was anti-…